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Marratxi requesting exhumation of Civil War graves

President Armengol and other leading politicians at the exhumation in Porreres. | J. Socies

| Marratxi |

Marratxi town hall is to ask the government to include bodies in the municipal cemetery in the map of graves of victims of Francoism. The request is backed by a study by the Majorca Historical Memory association which details places where assassinations occurred and autopsies carried out in 1936. There are five bodies in all, four of them unidentified.

The town's culture councillor, Josep Ramis, says that the request is in accordance with the need to recover the memory of victims of Francoist repression and that exhumation would be straightforward as the graves are in a good condition.

The deaths were registered on 17, 19 and 22 August 1936 and burials were ordered on 18, 21 and 24 August.

The first of the victims was Germà Ballester Janer, whose body was found by the Palma-Inca road in an area which at that time was more or less uninhabited; the nearest house was some 400 metres away, according to the judge of the time. Three bullet wounds were noted by the autopsy. A year later, his murder was dismissed as having been an "accident". Germà Ballester was an attorney with the court in Palma and was 54 when he died.

The second victim, a man of about 25 years old, was found on 19 August near the Son Verger finca. He had also been shot. He was buried shortly after in the cemetery because of the heat. On 22 August, the local judge returned to the Inca road by the finca Ses Cases Noves, where there were the bodies of three men, whose ages were estimated as being between 35 and 40. The final report into their deaths also attributed them to an "accident".

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